Becoming a starpilot can get you killed. Landing on a faraway planet, Brian doesn’t know the rules of the pilot’s academy, of the planet he has reached or what it takes to fly among the stars. He is sure of only one thing. He has to survive his training if he wants Earth to receive the support it needs to face the collapse of its ecology.If you want to recapture that sense of wonder from reading … recapture that sense of wonder from reading Robert Heinlein’s “Have space suit, will travel” and the tale of adventure and going beyond one’s own limit from L.E. Modesitt Jr, then you won’t want to miss this thought provoking novel.
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REVISED EDITION
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There are not any detailed spoilers here, but I talk about the over-all novel, so there might be a few minor spoilers.
Human Starpilot is a midsized book, and for me, it had two distinct flavors. The first half of the book follows a group of students through a very exclusive university, a school where candidates begin their training to become Star Pilots. There are enormous advantages for individuals who can advance within the training, and not just for themselves personally.
Becoming a Star Pilot greatly raises the status of your home world within the “Federation” of planets, and thanks to this, a Star Pilot’s home world can become eligible for any help from the Federation it happens to need. Some planets in the story have toxic levels of nuclear fallout, some are suffering from extreme global warming, some from full-swing ice-ages, but whatever the particulars, the students of this University are all striving for more than their own glory. They are each trying to save their home planet, and the pressure is grueling.
The structure of the book morphs as some of these students begin to work aboard starships and external elements are introduced into the storyline. These external situations tend to rise, develop, and resolve within a few pages, and as each is replaced by a new situation, it feels like the book is not only moving, but is picking up momentum (like a Starship leaving a dock).
Speaking only for myself, the first half of this book seemed to have something like a gigantic pyramid shape – with the base of the pyramid being the University itself, a feast for fans of world building. The particulars of the University systems and the histories of how they came to be have all been thought out, and are a very present feature of the narrative. Built on this, are the stories of the students themselves. Of this class of about twenty, the author focuses on a handful of about five or six, displaying their hardships, their successes, their rivalries and their romantic liaisons. The author eventually sets his focus on an Earthman named Brian, a student who struggles to complete his training (most of the students struggle – to ask a question is to be congratulated, and handed more coursework). Brian does manage to advance on to actual flight time. It is this character who we follow in the second half of the book.
Leading a starship through hyperspace requires a pilot who has been augmented with performance boosting nanites. Brian has, but adjusting to them, and fully controlling them, are skills all new pilots have to master. Brian’s troubles are slightly unusual, but one gets the idea that every individual undergoing this ordeal would have an individual, and possibly unique, response.
So, combined, that’s what this book looks like to me: a great big pyramid that sends out a linear pulse beam. The pulse beam is the flight of the ship Brian begins his training on, and the pulses are the individual story samplings the journey provides – there is an attack by another ship. There is political intrigue. There is survival in a jungle environment, there is an encounter with a stranded AI. Each story element leads into the next, but they don’t all feel connected. And that’s not a complaint. They feel like events along a journey, meant to suggest the vastness of experiences a Star Pilot might encounter without giving each event its own book.
That leaves only the tip of the pyramid still to describe, and for me, the tip was made up of the sense of mystery and menace the author weaves throughout the first half of the book. The “Federation” appears to be both more AND less than it seems. Its grace and enlightenment appear to be facades. No masks are ripped away in this book, but the groundwork is set. This book was written before 2020, but it was amazing to me how many offhand comments in the narrative seem to point to our current troubles. There are riots going on in the University world. They don’t get spoken about much; they are in the background, but the author didn’t miss them. He also mentions that the riots were the work of instigators taking advantage of authentic protests, something that struck as prescient to the riots we are witnessing in the U.S.. Also a bit unnerving were the characters’ anxieties about the injections they were going to have to receive. The nanites each pilot must incorporate into their bodies are delivered through injection. The injections change the body. They are irreversible. They produce brutal side effects – all analogous to the anxieties we all are feeling about the **vid va**ines, and the similarities shocked me.
All that being said, the riffing the author does with the concepts surrounding nanites were far and away my favorite part of the book. I was shocked by the initial anxiety scenes; then thrilled when the nanites kicked in just at the moment of hyperjump, where suddenly the pilot is as adept as the situation is demanding; and then my mind was blown by some of the extrapolations the author does with the basic premise of nanites: a person being infected with rival nanites; airborne nanites as an environmental hazard; a person, in sickness, waiting helplessly for the outcome of a nanite war going on within their own body.
This book offers an enthusiastic succession of sci-fi concept riffs – here’s a cool idea about clothing, here’s a cool idea about money, about star ships, about architecture, about space travel vulnerabilities, etc. etc. This is a big, generous work, that definitely serves its audience. This book is weaving together an entire system of worlds, but fair warning, with so many aspects to present and consider, there is a natural trade-off with story momentum. This is not a swashbuckling space adventure.
So, a cool first book in a series: a contemplation of one person’s transformation as he moves from a Human, to a Human Star Pilot, from a student contending with doubts, to a hyperjump practitioner contending with new physical abilities; and if you are a fan of star travel stories, or university stories, or of worldbuilding. you will find plenty to love in this book, and you should immerse yourself immediately.
Review by Rik Ty
There’s a smashing idea at the heart of Human Starpilot. Humanity has encountered aliens, and it might just be the thing that saves an Earth facing the collapse of its ecology. Earth has something of its own that the aliens want – pilots.
Earth suddenly finds itself trying to find a place in an alliance that depends on technology far more ancient than those using it, and its bargaining chips will be the humans trying to earn a place alongside other species as pilots of these vessels.
The story itself follows Brian and his fellow cadets as they try to master the art of piloting, something that requires the use of nanotechnology injected into their systems – something that can fundamentally change the pilots themselves, or even kill them.
In a lot of ways, we’re in the same kind of territory here as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, and there’s something of the same sense of exploring the morality behind the use of technology too, with the lives of the pilots little more than a way of Earth getting what it wants – and the pilots keenly aware that the price of failure if they don’t master this alien technology could be the catastrophic failure of Earth’s ecosystem.
So far, so good – but there is a but. I’m not certain, but it feels as if this book is written in the author’s second language. Credit for that, they do a lot better than I would, and that brings with it too some good things in a different approach – but it really needed a tighter edit. There are a lot of incorrect word choices and typos, but it could also have done with better editing overall to make the story slimmer and smoother. Some of the errors are glaring, such as when a list of five trade rules is presented and it only lists four. The title itself I’m not 100% sure of – on my version of the book it’s Human Starpilot, while on Goodreads it’s got an extra s on the end as in the picture above.
A lot of the ideas in the book are interesting, but the wording makes it harder to get your head around some of them, while a lot is left hanging over to be resolved in sequels.
All told, I generally liked it, but would advise readers to take a look at the “Look Inside” function in online shops before they take the plunge. If you can live with the occasional incorrect word choice or typos here and there, go right ahead. For me, though, it really needed a solid edit to make the story shine.